Design and analysis of intelligent strategies to play pacman

Abstract:

Pacman is a popular arcade game developed in 1980 and is well known among the masses. The main character in the game is Pacman, whose movement is controlled by the player. The other characters in the game are four ghosts trying to catch the Pacman. The characters are positioned out in a maze layout where pills are placed along the way. In order for the player to win the game, they must make Pacman eat all of those pills without getting eaten by any of the ghosts. The player has three chances to complete the maze after which the game is over.
The gameplay of Pacman can be thought of as a combination of maze solving as well as risk avoidance game. Since the game is played in a maze and Pacman as well as the ghosts have almost similar movement options like Up, Down, Left and Right, the game can be modeled with a fitting data structure like a Graph. Special points in the maze can be considered as the nodes in the graph and the movement of the characters will be over the edges between those vertices. For the risk avoidance aspect of the game, there needs to be a formal strategy guiding Pacman’s movements so as to avoid getting eaten by a ghost. The complexity of the game depends upon the complexity of the structure of the maze itself as well as the ghost characteristics which are specific to a ghost. In addition to this, it is also interesting to find out which ghosts will be more threatening to Pacman’s progress throughout the game. Therefore, this research study puts these agendas in focus to carry out the analysis of the various parameters of the game and what effect it has on the gameplay when some of these parameters are altered.